Depression and the public life

Jennifer Senior has some interesting thoughts on the special challenges that people with relentlessly public jobs and episodic depression face, with particular reference to John Fetterman:

As a senator, you can never not be on, in other words. Your life is an Ironman Triathlon of outward-facing obligations: constituent sit-downs, committee meetings, caucus lunches, votes on the floor, home-state parades and fairs and school visits and town halls and barbecues where you’re asked to don a puffy chef’s hat.

I have often written about the usefulness of the sociologist Erving Goffman’s distinction between “front-stage” and backstage selves when it comes to politics. To briefly summarize: Our front-stage selves are controlled, formal, fit for public consumption; our backstage selves are unvarnished, less filtered, generally reserved for intimates-the people we are when we drop the facade. (For anyone who’s thirsty for more, see Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.)

Politicians, particularly members of Congress, are almost always required to be front-stage creatures, for exactly the reasons I have described: all those damn committee meetings, constituent sit-downs, puffy hats. We tend to expect a certain level of formality from them-and absent that, a certain consistency of performance.

But depression, almost by definition, is a backstage emotion: lonely, prickly, uncomely. When you’re in the throes of it-something I know a thing or two about-it positively defies salable shtick. What this means is that every high-functioning depressed person has a self they try very hard to conceal. It is work performing your wellness-for some people, it’s more exhausting than their actual day job.

And from what little we know, that seemed to be the case for Fetterman. It is said that he was unhappy that he missed out on (and still hasn’t gotten) the time he needed to properly recover from his stroke. And now here he is, in one of the most public-facing jobs imaginable-possibly even more so than the presidency, where you have the luxury of retreating into the antiqued seclusion of the White House, away from reporters and constituents.

I found William Styron’s memoir Darkness Visible a useful (and terrifying) glimpse into the world of depression, which as he emphasizes is a strikingly inadequate word for the condition:

“Melancholia” would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness. It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated–the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer- -had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering”depression” as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.

As one who has suffered from the malady in extremis yet returned to tell the tale, I would lobby for a truly arresting designation.

“Brainstorm, ” for instance, has unfortunately been preempted to describe, somewhat jocularly, intellectual inspiration. But something along these lines is needed. Told that someone’s mood disorder has evolved into a storm- -a veritable howling tempest in the brain, which is indeed what a clinical depression resembles like nothing else-even the uninformed layman might display sympathy rather than the standard reaction that “depression” evokes, something akin to “So what?” or “You’ll pull out of it” or “We all have bad days.” The phrase “nervous breakdown” seems to be on its way out, certainly deservedly so, owing to its insinuation of a vague spinelessness, but we still seem destined to be saddled with “depression” until a better, sturdier name is created.